On my way home from Norway to Germany last week I stopped off in Brussels for a meeting about global warming.
One of the participants was a small, slightly dishevelled but very pleasant, elderly gentleman from Mainz, and it was noticeable that he was treated with very great respect by everyone.
He was direct, sometimes forthright, but never obtrusive in his views, and he spoke with great authority. He was Paul Crutzen, one of the very few scientists to have won a Nobel Prize for any subject closely related to meteorology.
Crutzen was born in Amsterdam in 1933 and qualified as a civil engineer, a profession in which he practised for several years.
But in 1958 he changed direction: he joined the Department of Meteorology at the University of Stockholm as a computer programmer, and thus, became involved in the early stages of the development of weather forecasts by computer. He went on to acquire two doctorates in meteorology.
Then in the 1960s, Crutzen developed an interest in the ozone layer. His work began with an investigation into the possible harmful effects of emissions from supersonic aircraft on stratospheric ozone.
It culminated during the 1970s in his elegant explanation of the way in which chlorine compounds, produced by the now infamous CFCs, could act as catalysts at very low temperatures to promote the widespread depletion of ozone in the upper atmosphere.
Crutzen's theories were confirmed by the surprise discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985. Ten years later he shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with two others in recognition of their exceptional contribution to our understanding of these critically important atmospheric processes.
Only two other Nobel laureates I know of had any connection with the weather.
Sir Edward Appleton, whose Physics prize in 1947 recognised his discovery in the upper atmosphere of what has come to be called the Appleton layer, had strong meteorological connections, and one of the first recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was the Swedish scientist Svante August Arrhenius, who first drew attention in the 1890s to the problems that might be caused by the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of burning massive quantities of coal.
He might be described as the father of our modern theories about global warming.
But Arrhenius's prize in 1903 had nothing whatever to do with meteorology: it was described, somewhat esoterically, as being "for extraordinary services rendered to the advancement of chemistry by the electrolytic theory of dissociation".